Homesickness and the tokoloshe

We had a weekend of feeding the hordes - friends came around on Saturday and we made a potjie (picture above) which roughly translates into a giant stew. I chose goulash as it is one of my favourite dishes in all the world and it tastes even better the next day. It cooked away on the stove in the cast iron potjie (cauldron, then) for around six hours. Needless to say the beef was so tender it broke apart into even smaller strips and bits when I dished the food that evening. Man oh man - it was gorgeous. Like with all kinds of meat dishes used for a stew/sauce, by cooking away for hours on the stovetop it only benefited. My con carne and chilli never cooks for less than three hours.

Oh well - the potjie put me in mind of family and friends, back in South Africa. The fact that I am reading a new author who had written "Gem Squash Tokoloshe" didn't help either. It is set in the Northern Transvaal and so liberally peppered with true South Africanisms that unless you come from there, you wouldn't get it. The tokoloshe in the title is a kind of boogyman that the bantu/natives (I have no idea what to term them anymore...indigenous south africans?) believed in. They would raise their beds off the ground by placing bricks under the feet which helped prevent the tokoloshe from stealing you away.

And there I sat today, wrapped in a cloak of memories - homesick is the word. Plain and simple. Not even for the country itself but for my family and for my childhood when lazing about in the garden, at the side of the house was the best thing in the world, eating watermelon till you couldn't breathe and chasing the dog up into the apricot tree and then having to climb after it to rescue it. How we used to plot and plan a raid on the neighbour's fruit orchard and how to sneak the long way back so that no one would catch you. Or listening to Springbok Radio after school, whilst doing your homework, keeping up to date with the radio soapies was the thing to do. Then changing over to listening to Radio 5 and their pop and rock music. And in the evenings there was Radio Highveld that played the smooth "classics". How innocent and uncomplicated life was then...How desperately I wanted to be an archeologist and dig up treasure that I used to steal money from my mom's purse and bury it in the driveway and dig it up a few minutes later and pretend it was a find even cooler than Carter finding King Tut's tomb!

How, at Christmas, there were so many presents under the tree that you can't fathom how Kersvader managed to get his fat gut through the door, nevermind all that loot! How I couldn't figure out why my dad kept on disappearing at a certain time of night on Christmas eve and then, suddenly, there was Father Christmas in his big red suit, squishy tummy and beard...and how odd he was, smelling just like my dad...and they even had the same old scars on their hands from working with machinery. I was about thirteen when I eventually figured out they were the one and the same. How the tables groaned under food made by my mom and all my sisters! We used to feast like there was no tomorrow and the next day...it would happen all over again. And of course, Christmas was in Summer so that was even better cos you could go play outside in the sprinklers after opening presents just because it was that hot.

I told a friend today how I longed for that...for those memories again and she told me the Welsh have a name for it...it is called Hireath (no doubt I have misspelt it) but it means longing, homesickness, a longing for a youth that once was. And that is how it has been these past few days. Tsk.

Thanks for ruminating with me. It was a good haul.